Roger Ebert, His Foot, and His Mouth
I keep getting e-mail about Roger Ebert. I have no desire to think of Roger Ebert, as his face takes on a strange sort of Silly Putty quality when he spackles it with makeup, and quite frankly it unnerves me. So to enable me to stop thinking of Roger Ebert, allow me to address what he said recently about games.Here's an excerpt (in response to a question for his online column):
Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.
I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.
Oh, I get it. So Roger Ebert is kind of a snob. I'll come back to that.
Here's the thing. Roger Ebert is a film critic. When he talks about films, he has a body of work that indicates he should be respected.
So where, exactly, is his body of work on the value of various entertainment mediums and their worth? Um, it's nowhere, as far as I can tell, because he doesn't have one. He is totally unqualified to assess what games might or might not become. His entire premise is that by giving the player any degree of control, the designer relinquishes "authorial control," which he apparently considers the core of "serious" film and literature.
Which is crap.
Authors and directors deal in ambiguities all the time. They create ambiguities to force the audience to make their own interpretations among several different possibilities. Was Deckard a replicant in Blade Runner? How stoned was Stanley Kubrick when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey, and can anyone definitively say what that film "really" meant, even forty years later?
Branching story lines or events that give the player "choice" don't relinquish authorial control unless the author had no control to begin with, or doesn't want control. The ultimate impact of a story can be preserved even with many player choices during the course of a game.
Roger Ebert has a facile understanding of games, and because of this be believes that games themselves are facile. It's not really any more complicated than that. He's a very bright man writing about something that he knows almost nothing about.
The snob part? That's when he says that time spent gaming "represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic." Oh, la-ti-da, Mr. Farnsworth. Your polo pony has been brushed and is waiting for you at the stable.
So he doesn't think games have a place at the big boy's table, just like film didn't have a place at the big-boy table compared to "real" theatre, or television didn't have a place at the table compared to film, or anything new had a place at the table compared to anything old. This kind of dismissal has happened to absolutely every new entertainment medium in the last century. And, as point of fact, all of those dismissals have ultimately been proven wrong.
Here's another excerpt (from a question in the 11/13 column):
I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense.
If that's an answer on a logic test, he gets an "F".
Notice how he spends more than half his time trying to impress us with what he's done "recently." His answer, though, is a complete mess. He admits he's "unfamiliar" (translation: knows nothing) about video games, but then says that if they really were as valuable as books and film, that "someone" would have made a "convincing argument" in their defense.
What?
One of many fundamental errors in his "reasoning" lies in trying to put a score on an entertainment medium as a whole. The best of almost any genre is going to be better than a middling effort of another genre. Are the best games as "valuable" as the best films? Well, everyone can have a different definition of value, but Fatal Frame II had a more powerful emotional impact on me than all but a handful of films I've seen in my life. Because we are involved, because we do make choices, because we are active participants instead of passive viewers, games can potentially have an even greater impact on us than films or literature.
Not knowing anything about games, Ebert doesn't understand that. But it doesn't really matter, does it? Because whenever he talks about anything but film, he's totally irrelevant.
Oh, and Roger--I play games and I've seen films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, too. Non-gamers don't have exclusive rights on culture. Snob.
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